Recollections of My Youth eBook

indifference; my indulgency, which is sincere enough,
and is due to the fact that I see clearly how unjust
men are to one another; my conscientious habits, which
afford me real pleasure, and my infinite capacity
for enduring ennui, attributable perhaps to my having
been so well inoculated by ennui during my youth that
it has never taken since, are all to be explained by
the circle in which I lived, and the profound impressions
which I received. Since I left St. Sulpice, I
have been constantly losing ground, and yet, with
only a quarter the virtues of a St. Sulpice man, I
have, I think, been far above the average.

I should like to explain in detail and show how the
paradoxical resolve to hold fast to the clerical virtues,
without the faith upon which they are based, and in
a world for which they are not designed, produced
so far as I was concerned, the most amusing encounters.
I should like to relate all the adventures which my
Sulpician habits brought about, and the singular tricks
which they played me. After leading a serious
life for sixty years, mirth is no offence, and what
source of merriment can be more abundant, more harmless,
and more ready to hand than oneself? If a comedy
writer should ever be inclined to amuse the public
by depicting my foibles I would readily give my assent
if he agreed to let me join him in the work, as I could
relate things far more amusing than any which he could
invent. But I find that I am transgressing the
first rule which my excellent masters laid down, viz.,
never to speak of oneself. I will therefore treat
this latter part of my subject very briefly.

FIRST STEPS OUTSIDE ST. SULPICE.

PART IV.

The moral teaching inculcated by the pious masters
who watched over me so tenderly up to the age of three-and-twenty
may be summed up in the four virtues of disinterestedness
or poverty, modesty, politeness, and strict morality.
I propose to analyse my conduct under these four heads,
not in any way with the intention of advertising my
own merits, but in order to give those who profess
the philosophy of good-natured scepticism an opportunity
of exercising their powers of observation at my expense.

I. Poverty is of all the clerical virtues the one
which I have practised the most faithfully. M.
Olier had painted for his church a picture in which
St. Sulpice was represented as laying down the fundamental
rule of life for his clerks: Habentes alimenta
et quibus tegamur, his contenti sumus. This
was just my idea, and I could desire nothing better
than to be provided with lodging, board, lights, and
firing, without any intervention of my own, by some
one who would charge me a fixed sum and leave me entirely
my own master. The arrangement which dated from
my settlement in the little pension of the
Faubourg St. Jacques was destined to become the economic